From his own point of view, it is as short and fragile as any of ours, Gaby thought. Too few sleeps and wakings.
She read the name on the next room.
‘Here,’ she said to Russel Shuler. ‘I want to see who is in here.’
William Bi was the name on the door.
‘Please excuse me,’ a voice called over a rhythmic creaking. ‘I will not stop because you won’t be staying very long, and if I stop I will not come third.’
William Bi sat on an exercise bike, pumping the pedals hard. He was dressed in stained red sweat shorts and cropped sweatshirt. On a flat wall screen a garishly animated cyclist raced across a poster colour road toward an ever-receding horizon.
‘Hello, Gaby,’ William said without taking his eyes off the screen or breaking his rhythm. He was as thin and young and androgynously beautiful as Gaby remembered when the dirigible lifted them from the burning Nissan ATV on Chaga’s edge. ‘I thought I’d be running into you here.’
‘William, I’m sorry. I never meant this to happen.’
‘Sarai is the only one can make happen what she wants to happen. But I can see what she makes happen, so I am content.’
‘William’s time sense has been altered,’ Russel Shuler. ‘He lives in a longer present moment than we do. What we perceive as the present is about six seconds. William’s present is about three and a half minutes, both forward and back, with limited pre- and post-cognition up to about half an hour.’
‘I think you should call the maintenance people,’ William said, leaning over the handlebars of the exercise bike. He had overtaken the first computer cyclist, and was coming up on the rear wheel of another. ‘The air conditioning plant is going to give you trouble again in about ten minutes.’
Russel Shuler took an intercom from inside his Nehru jacket and made a call.
‘He’s almost always right,’ he said when he had finished talking to the engineers. ‘We’ve had to stop members of staff getting racing tips off him, or lottery numbers.’
‘He can see into the future and the past?’ one of the Assemblypersons asked. ‘All at once?’
‘Simultaneously, yes. I don’t think our short-time-frame minds can ever properly conceive what it must be like. Perhaps a state of permanent déjà vu for both the past and the future.’
‘She will not thank you for it,’ William said abruptly, pumping hard at the pedals. Sweat rolled down his forehead. ‘The diary. Reminds her too much of things she would like to forget.’
He passed the animated cyclist and crossed the finish line. As he had predicted, he was third.
At the top of the next down ramp, Russel Shuler said to the commissioners, ‘Down on Zone Red Level Two are the moderate physical adaptations. You may find some of them disturbing, but please do not display any negative emotion in front of the patients. Many of them are experiencing great difficulty in coming to terms with what the Chaga has done to their bodies.’
The colour of the walls in Red Level Two was several shades deeper than the corridor above; blood rather than sheer hell.
In the first room, a woman reclined on a wooden beach lounger under a ceiling of dazzling white light. She was naked, but for a polka dot bikini bottom. Her hair, her eyes, her skin were dark green. Russel Shuler told the Enquiry that she was a photosynthete. Her skin and circulatory system had been infected with complex molecules that bonded to the cells and enabled them to draw food and energy directly from sunlight, like plants. The full-spectrum tubes in the ceiling approximated normal African daylight. In the dark she would wither and shiver and die.
The woman turned her back to the National Assembly Commission of Inquiry and picked up the copy of Viva! she had set down on the floor.
Dr Dan picked the next door at random. Behind it they found a middle-aged woman on a chair with a monkey grooming itself on her shoulder and her hands on her knees. At her feet a cat sat licking its crotch. A bird bobbed on top of the dressing table mirror. The dressing table top was smeared with white bird shit. The woman had no eyes. Blank skin covered her eye sockets. She had no ears. Her skull was a smooth curve of flesh. Yet when the people came into her suite she turned her head toward them, as if seeing and hearing, and welcomed them warmly.
‘It’s the animals,’ she told them. ‘I see through their eyes, hear through their ears.’ She lifted the monkey on to her lap. ‘But they have such short little spans of attention.’
Russel Shuler explained that the woman had neurological grafts into the nervous systems of her animals. She could switch her point of view between them, and was learning to multiplex: cat sight, monkey smell, bird hearing.
‘I’ve seen this one,’ Gaby said. ‘In the Chaga: Hubert, the Treetoppers’ kid; he can share his consciousness with other creatures in the forest.’
‘Indeed?’ Russel Shuler said.
‘I must look out for him,’ the woman with the animal eyes said.
‘What is it all for?’ a woman lawyer asked as they hurried onward down the corridor, past doors they did not have time to look behind, towards the ramp to Zone Red Level Three. ‘What is the reason for these transformations?’
‘Evolution, ma’am,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘Just ways of being human. No more reason for it than the eyes on butterflies’ wings or a peacock’s tail. Every reason and no reason: it works. It’s right for its place and time.’
He addressed the Enquiry in general.
‘Before we go down to the third and final level, I must warn you that this is where the most radically changed are housed. What you see may provoke repugnance, shock, even fear. Remember that they are human. They will not harm you, they are not dangerous. They are just people; experiments in ways of being human. If any of you don’t want to come with us down to Level Three, you can get straight up to the reception area by going a couple of hundred yards back along this corridor and taking the service elevator. I’ll give you a few seconds to make up your minds.’
Mine is made up, Gaby McAslan thought. I have found only one name on my list of the disappeared. The other two are down that ramp, whatever they have become, and so I will not go back.
Russel Shuler waited his few seconds. No one turned back.
‘OK,’ Russel Shuler said. ‘One final thing. If you have anything plastic that you particularly value, you’d be advised to leave it here. In some cases, the alterations have spread beyond the individual to the environment.’
‘What does that mean?’ Dr Dan said, unfastening his badge and digital watch.
‘You’ll find out.’
They went down, leaving a small pile of identity badges, watches and pens behind them.
The first door opened on to an antechamber into which the Commissioners fitted with much jostling. In the facing wall was a long, curtained window and an airlock door. Russel Shuler picked up a microphone plugged into a socket underneath the window.
‘The temperature and CO2 levels are too high for human tolerance in there,’ he said. ‘But I’ll get Kighoma to say hello to you.’ He spoke into the microphone in good Swahili. ‘Pray this is one variation that doesn’t take,’ he said as he drew back the curtains.
The room beyond was quite conventional. The young man who waved from the chair in which he was reading a football magazine was not. His skin was such a flat black that he seemed to have no facial features. His hair was bone white. His eyes were milky, as if afflicted with cataracts. His nose was very large and broad, his chest wide and deep. While Russel Shuler and Assemblypersons spoke with him in Swahili, Gaby observed him more closely. The dead black skin was thick and waxy; hairless, almost poreless. The milkiness of the eyes was caused by a membrane like a cat’s third eyelid that flickered back and forth between blinkings.